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Argentine judge rejects cover-up charges in AMIA case

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Press TV – February 26, 2015

An Argentine judge has dismissed cover-up charges against the country’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in the 1994 AMIA case.

Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas said there were no elements to justify continuation of an investigation on an alleged political effort by President Kirchner to cover up the role claimed to have been played by Iran in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center.

The documents against Kirchner failed to meet “the minimal conditions needed to launch a formal court investigation,” the judge added.

Argentina’s Federal Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita is expected to appeal the ruling.

Pollicita replaced Alberto Nisman who was found dead in the bathroom of his apartment in the capital, Buenos Aires, on January 18.

The initial police report said Nisman had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Nisman’s death came hours before he was to testify in a congressional hearing about the AMIA attack.

The prosecutor had accused a number of high-ranking Argentine officials including President Kirchner, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and lawmaker Andrés “Cuervo” Larroqu of trying to ‘protect Iranians’ in the case.

The Argentinean president has frequently dismissed the claim against Iran, saying the late prosecutor’s allegations were baseless and absurd.

The “real move against the government was the prosecutor’s death…. They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead. It is that sad and terrible,” the Buenos Aires Herald quoted Kirchner as saying on January 22.

In July 1994, a car bomb exploded at the building of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, also known as AMIA, in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people died and some 300 were injured.

The Israeli regime accuses Tehran of masterminding the terrorist attack. The Islamic Republic of Iran has strongly denied any involvement in the incident.

February 26, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Argentine Congress votes to scrap intelligence agency

Press TV – February 26, 2015

Argentine legislators have voted to disband the South American country’s intelligence agency and replace it with a new federal body that will be accountable to the Congress.

The lower house of Congress voted 131 to 71 in favor of the bill, which had already been approved by the Senate.

The measure came after President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner drafted a proposal last month to dissolve the Secretariat of Intelligence (SI) and set up a new service to be called the Federal Intelligence Agency, after the government said a renegade spy was linked to the death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman.

Fernandez has said Antonio Stiuso, who for years was the powerful director of operations at the SI, pushed Nisman into filing a formal criminal complaint against her, and was involved in the prosecutor’s death.

On Tuesday, Oscar Parilli, who was appointed as the SI director in December last year, said Stiuso and others had illegally imported electronic goods and other equipment between 2013 and 2014.

Parrilli said the ring made use of a special law that allows the SI to import secret equipment, and illegally imported electronic goods as well as other equipment, without paying taxes or informing customs officials.

Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers have voiced their discontent with the decision to dissolve Argentina’s intelligence body, arguing that the General Attorney’s Office would now be in charge of overseeing all wiretaps.

“The most important issue is the lack of oversight,” opposition lawmaker Manuel Garrido said.

He added, “What worries us is that there has not been, nor will there be proper control.”

Garrido said he offered an alternative bill that incorporated stricter controls, but it was obstructed by the ruling coalition.

February 26, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | Leave a comment

French Court Prevents Extradition of Alleged Argentine Torturer

teleSUR | February 18, 2015

France’s highest court prevented the extradition of an Argentine alleged torturer, Mario Sandoval, Wednesday.

According to the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), a lower court ruled that Sandoval should be extradited to Argentina to face charges of crimes against humanity, deprivation of liberty and acts of torture causing death. France’s supreme court, the Cour de Cassation, overturned that ruling but also ruled that the case should be re-examined.

Sandoval was a federal police officer during Argentina’s so-called “dirty war” where the military dictatorship targeted leftist activists, disappearing and killing as many as 30,000 people. He moved to France after the fall of Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship and obtained French citizenship in 1997. He is accused of having committed over 600 human rights violations.

According to Argentine newspaper Pagina 12, Sandoval also gave classes to his colleagues on the “anti-subversive fight” that included methods of torture during interrogations.

The extradition request was based on the case of Hernan Abriata, an architecture student and political activist who was kidnapped from his home in 1976. Sandoval is alleged to have taken him to a clandestine prison in 1976, where an estimated 5,000 people were taken and disappeared.

The Argentine government’s lawyer expressed disappointment at the court’s ruling, which according to Sandoval’s lawyer was based on a technicality.

“This is a bad decision, but we can still salvage it somehow,” said Sophie Thonon-Wesfreid, representing Argentina’s government.

In France, once courts rule for an extradition, it must be further approved by governmental decree.

February 19, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Stories of Argentina’s stolen children

The last victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship knew nothing of their true identities. One day though, their worlds turned upside down when they learned a terrible truth. Everything they knew, their families, their names, was all part of a monstrous and cruel conspiracy. It was only through the tireless efforts of their natural grandmothers, who searched for decades, that these children had their real identities returned to them. The natural parents were among the “disappeared,” former activists against the military Junta. Now, aware of the web of deception that surrounded their early years, they have to learn to live as their true selves, and with their past.

February 2, 2015 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Argentine president seeks to dissolve intelligence body

Press TV – January 27, 2015

Argentina’s president has described the country’s intelligence agency as a “national debt” and has announced plans to disband it.

President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner made the remarks in a Monday TV address, saying she would prepare a draft legislation to set up an alternative body.

“I have prepared a bill to reform the intelligence service,” said Fernandez, insisting that she wanted the idea discussed at an urgent session of the nation’s Congress.

She further stated that her plan “is to dissolve the Intelligence Secretariat and create a Federal Intelligence Agency” and added that a new leadership for the intelligence agency should be picked by a president and confirmed by the South American country’s Senate.

Fernandez further argued that the intelligence services maintained the same structure they had during the US-backed military government that ended in 1983.

“Combating impunity has been a priority of my government,” she emphasized.

She made the decision following the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman hours before he was reportedly due to testify against senior government authorities.

Nisman had been probing the bombing of a Jewish center in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people.

He was found dead on January 18 in his apartment in Buenos Aires.

Investigators initially said they believed he had committed suicide, but later clarified that homicide or “induced suicide” could not be ruled out.

President Fernandez has emphasized that she does not believe Nisman’s death was a suicide.

January 27, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

A logical and cogent suicide thesis for Alberto Nisman

IncaKolaNews | January 25, 2015

The latest we know, as of this Sunday morning, is that the day before his death and just before asking his work colleague Lagomarsino to lend him his pistol (the 100% confirmed weapon of death), Alberto Nisman also asked one of the police officers on protection duty around his apartment building to lend him his gun, which the officer refused to do. Nisman again used the same line, that he wanted one to carry in his car for a few days until he bought a gun for himself.

Which again nudges the evidence towards suicide, though I want to make plain as I did yesterday that there’s no proof of this yet and we’re talking possibles versus probables, not black versus white certainties. We shouldn’t discard any hypothesis yet. But as suicide now seems more likely than it did just a few days ago when the world was quick to shout and scream and accuse the CFK government of killing an enemy, consider this:

  • There was some sort of emergency that got him to cut short his vacation with his daughter in Europe, hand over her charge to his ex-wife and bring him quickly back to Argentina in the days before his death.
  • He was due to give evidence to support his accusations against the CFK government the day after his death, but his dossier had already been deposed and opened to authorities and judiciary (its contents are now being revealed, striptease-style, to the general public). As soon as it was available (three or four days before his death) there was immediate push back from both pro-government and (relatively) neutral bodies who spotted false information and obvious contradictions in his version of events. One that’s been widely reported is how Nisman claimed he had been given key evidence about supposed intelligence officers, but in fact (and in proven fact now) those people are not and have never been members of the intelligence services.
  • So, let us imagine you have a less than perfect personal life. Let’s also imagine you’ve been working under great pressure, in terms of workload and of psychological pressure from government enemies, for two years on a case you think shows major corruption in your current government (up to and including the President of your country). Let’s imagine that things come to a head, you complete your work, you’re satisfied with your job done, you hand in this national-level important case file…and then suddenly the whole thing blows up in your face because one of the most basic elements on which you based your argument is shown, with very little room for error, to be false. That, ladies and gentlemen, is years of work down the drain.
  • And on top of that, in one day’s time you have to go to the nation’s Congress, stand up and defend your case and reiterate your accusations when you already know that the ground has been taken from under your feet and when the opponents ask you about the contradictions, you’re going to flounder and fail in front of them. And your personal life is a mess.

Anyway, that’s the basic thesis for suicide here and I’m fully aware it doesn’t cover all angles. For example why is there no suicide note (as either one hasn’t been found as yet, or if it has we haven’t been told about it)? No idea, but as suicide of this type is a wholly selfish and egocentric act, people in that mental position feel no obligation to anyone else and there doesn’t have to be a note, not even to your most loved ones. I’m not saying the above is the answer to the whole thing, not at all. But it is addressed to those who say “he can’t have killed himself”. It’s a logical and cogent possibility, like it or not.

January 26, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Rogue agents behind Argentine prosecutor’s death: Buenos Aires

Press TV – January 24, 2015

Argentina says rogue agents from its own intelligence services were behind the death of the prosecutor of the 1994 AMIA bombing case.

Alberto Nisman, the lead investigator into the 1994 attack on a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994, was found dead in his apartment late on January 18.

The initial police report said Nisman had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, however, said in a statement posted on her Facebook page on Thursday that the prosecutor’s death was not a suicide.

Nisman’s death happened hours before he was to testify before Congress on Monday about his allegation that President Fernandez conspired to derail his investigation of the attack.

The government claims the prosecutor’s allegations and his death were linked to a power struggle at the Latin American country’s intelligence agency and agents who had recently been fired.

“When he was alive they needed him to present the charges against the president. Then, undoubtedly, it was useful to have him dead,” the president’s chief of staff, Anibal Fernandez, said Friday.

Under intense political pressure imposed by Israel, Argentina formerly accused Iran of having carried out the 1994 bombing attack on the AMIA building. AMIA stands for the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina or the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association.

Iran has categorically and consistently denied any involvement in the terrorist bombing.

In January 2013, Tehran and Buenos Aires signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly probe the 1994 bombing.

January 24, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Argentina investigates security officers over AMIA prosecutor death

Press TV – January 24, 2015

Ten Argentine police forces assigned to protect the AMIA bombing case prosecutor are under investigation for their activities on the day he was found dead.

The officers, together with two supervisors, are being questioned as part of an internal police probe into the handling of Alberto Nisman’s death, a source close to the investigation said.

According to the source, the officers are not considered suspects, but they have all been suspended from duty during the probe.

The body of Nisman was discovered on January 18 in the bathroom of his apartment in a neighborhood of the capital, Buenos Aires, with a bullet wound in his head.

The initial police report said Nisman had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

On Thursday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner refused allegations that prosecutor Nisman committed suicide.

“I’m convinced that it was not suicide,” said the president in a statement posted on her Facebook page.

Nisman’s death happened hours before he was to testify in a congressional hearing about AMIA.

The “real move against the government was the prosecutor’s death… They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead. It is that sad and terrible,” the Buenos Aires Herald quoted Kirchner as writing in a letter on Thursday.

In July 1994, a car bomb exploded at the building of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, also known as AMIA, in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people died and hundreds more were injured.

The Israeli regime accuses Tehran of masterminding the terrorist attack. The Islamic Republic of Iran has strongly denied any involvement in the incident.

January 24, 2015 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Indictment of Iran for ’94 Terror Bombing Relied on MEK

By Gareth Porter | IPS News | August 8, 2013

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman based his 2006 warrant for the arrest of top Iranian officials in the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 on the claims of representatives of the armed Iranian opposition Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the full text of the document reveals.

The central piece of evidence cited in Nisman’s original 900-page arrest warrant against seven senior Iranian leaders is an alleged Aug. 14, 1993 meeting of top Iranian leaders, including both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then president Hashemi Rafsanjani, at which Nisman claims the official decision was made to go ahead with the planning of the bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA).

But the document, recently available in English for the first time, shows that his only sources for the claim were representatives of the MEK or People’s Mujahideen of Iran. The MEK has an unsavoury history of terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Iran, as well as of serving as an Iraq-based mercenary army for Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The organisation was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups last year after a campaign by prominent former U.S. officials who had gotten large payments from pro-MEK groups and individuals to call for its “delisting”.

Nisman’s rambling and repetitious report cites statements by four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the political arm of the MEK, as the sources for the charge that Iran decided on the AMIA bombing in August 1993.

The primary source is Reza Zakeri Kouchaksaraee, president of the Security and Intelligence Committee of the NCRI. The report quotes Kouchaksaraee as testifying to an Argentine Oral Court in 2003, “The decision was made by the Supreme National Security Council at a meeting that was held on 14 August, 1993. This meeting lasted only two hours from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.”

Nisman also quotes Hadi Roshanravani, a member of the International Affairs Committee of the NCRI, who claimed to know the same exact starting time of the meeting – 4:30 pm – but gave the date as Aug. 12, 1993 rather than Aug. 14.

Roshanravani also claimed to know the precise agenda of the meeting. The NCRI official said that three subjects were discussed: “The progress and assessment of the Palestinian Council; the strategy of exporting fundamentalism throughout the world; and the future of Iraq.” Roshanravani said “the idea for an attack in Argentina” had been discussed “during the dialogue on the second point”.

The NCRI/MEK was claiming that the Rafsanjani government had decided on a terrorist bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina as part of a policy of “exporting fundamentalism throughout the world”.

But that MEK propaganda line about the Iranian regime was contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment at the time. In its National Intelligence Estimate 34-91 on Iranian foreign policy, completed on Oct. 17, 1991, U.S. intelligence concluded that Rafsanjani had been “gradually turning away from the revolutionary excesses of the past decade… toward more conventional behavior” since taking over as president in 1989.

Ali Reza Ahmadi and Hamid Reza Eshagi, identified as “defectors” who were affiliated with NCRI, offered further corroboration of the testimony by the leading NCRI officials. Ahmadi was said by Nisman to have worked as an Iranian foreign service officer from 1981 to 1985. Eshagi is not otherwise identified.

Nisman quotes Ahmadi and Eshagi, who made only joint statements, as saying, “It was during a meeting held at 4:30 pm in August 1993 that the Supreme National Security Council decided to carry out activities in Argentina.”

Nisman does not cite any non-MEK source as claiming such a meeting took place. He cites court testimony by Abolghassem Mesbahi, a “defector” who had not worked for the Iranian intelligence agency since 1985, according to his own account, but only to the effect that the Iranian government made the decision on AMIA sometime in 1993. Mesbahi offered no evidence to support the claim.

Nisman repeatedly cites the same four NCRI members to document the alleged participation of each of the seven senior Iranians for whom he requested arrest warrants. A review of the entire document shows that Kouchaksaraee is cited by Nisman 29 times, Roshanravani 16 times and Ahmadi and Eshagi 16 times, always together making the same statement for a total of 61 references to their testimony.

Nisman cited no evidence or reason to believe that any of the MEK members were in a position to have known about such a high-level Iranian meeting. Although MEK propaganda has long claimed access to secrets, their information has been at best from low-level functionaries in the regime.

In using the testimony of the most violent opponents of the Iranian regime to accuse the most senior Iranian officials of having decided on the AMIA terrorist bombing, Nisman sought to deny the obvious political aim of all MEK information output of building support in the United States and Europe for the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

“The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared.

In an effort to lend the group’s testimony credibility, Nisman described their statements as being made “with honesty and rigor in a manner that respects nuances and details while still maintaining a sense of the larger picture”.

The MEK witnesses, Nisman wrote, could be trusted as “completely truthful”.

The record of MEK officials over the years, however, has been one of putting out one communiqué after another that contained information about alleged covert Iranian work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, nearly all of which turned out to be false when they were investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The only significant exception to the MEK’s overall record of false information on the Iranian nuclear programme was its discovery of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility and its Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.

But even in that case, the MEK official who announced the Natanz discovery, U.S. representative Alireza Jafarzadeh, incorrectly identified it as a “fuel fabrication facility” rather than as an enrichment facility. He also said it was near completion, although it was actually several months from having the equipment necessary to begin enrichment.

Contrary to the MEK claims that it got the information on Natanz from sources in the Iranian government, moreover, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported, a “senior IAEA official” told him in 2004 that Israeli intelligence had passed their satellite intelligence on Natanz to the MEK.

An adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the heir to the Shah, later told journalist Connie Bruck that the information about Natanz had come from “a friendly government”, which had provided it to both the Pahlavi organisation and the MEK.

Nisman has long been treated in pro-Israel, anti-Iran political circles as the authoritative source on the AMIA bombing case and the broader subject of Iran and terrorism. Last May, Nisman issued a new 500-page report accusing Iran of creating terrorist networks in the Western hemisphere that builds on his indictment of Iran for the 1994 bombing.

But Nisman’s readiness to base the crucial accusation against Iran in the AMIA case solely on MEK sources and his denial of their obvious unreliability highlights the fact that he has been playing a political role on behalf of certain powerful interests rather than uncovering the facts.

January 23, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Argentine president: AMIA prosecutor’s death not suicide

Press TV – January 22, 2015

Argentina says the suspicious death of the prosecutor of the 1994 AMIA bombing case was not a suicide.

“I’m convinced that it was not suicide,” said President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in a statement posted on her Facebook page on Thursday.

On January 18, the body of the Argentinean prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who had been investigating the AMIA case, was discovered in the bathroom of his apartment in a neighborhood of the capital, Buenos Aires.

The initial police report said Nisman had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Nisman’s death came hours before he was to testify in a congressional hearing about AMIA the next day.

The prosecutor had accused President Kirchner of trying to ‘protect Iranians’ in the AMIA case.

The Argentinean president dismissed the accusations against Iran concerning the deadly bomb attack, saying the late prosecutor’s allegations were baseless.

The “real move against the government was the prosecutor’s death…. They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead. It is that sad and terrible,” the Buenos Aires Herald on Thursday quoted Kirchner as writing in a separate letter.

In July 1994, a car bomb exploded at the building of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, also known as AMIA, in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people died and hundreds more were injured.

The Israeli regime accuses Tehran of masterminding the terrorist attack. The Islamic Republic of Iran has strongly denied any involvement in the incident.

January 22, 2015 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , | Leave a comment

Argentina sentences four ex-officers to life in prison

Press TV – December 19, 2014

A court in Argentina has handed down life sentences to four former military officers for committing crimes against humanity during the 1970s’ US-backed military dictatorship in the South American country.

On Thursday, the court in the capital, Buenos Aires, found the four guilty of “illegal deprivation of liberty, torture, rape and homicide,” involving 204 people out of the total 2,500 held at the Vesubio detention center between 1976 and 1978.

The four defendants are former colonels Federico Minicucci and Jorge Crespi, former intelligence officer, Gustavo Cacivio, and former colonel and prison official, Nestor Cendon.

The Vesubio detention center operated in the La Matanza district of Buenos Aires, until it was destroyed to prevent the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights from inspecting it during a country visit.

Famous comics writer, Héctor Oesterheld, author Haroldo Conti and filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer were among those who died in the prison.

Former Argentine Major Ernesto “Nabo” Barreiro has recently broken his 31-year pact of silence by revealing the locations of graves of people who disappeared under the military regime during the so-called “Dirty War” from 1976 to 1983.

Barreiro said some two dozen people are buried inside two large earthen ovens at a military base outside the central city of Cordoba.

Previous Argentine governments have failed to investigate crimes committed during the almost seven-year dictatorship due to the so-called Full Stop law, which saw an end to prosecutions. However, the law was repealed ten years ago.

The US-backed dictatorship in Argentina jailed, tortured and murdered dozens of people and forced thousands to flee the country during the war.

Federal courts are seeking the whereabouts of an estimated 30,000 people who were killed or abducted and presumed killed during the dictatorship.

December 19, 2014 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Argentine Government Suspends Procter & Gamble Operations

teleSUR | November 3, 2014

Argentine authorities this Sunday accused Procter & Gamble of tax fraud and suspended its operations in the country.

The government of the South American country suspended domestic operations for the transnational company Procter & Gamble for fiscal fraud and capital flight in import operations from Brazil for US$138 million that were being billed through a Swiss subsidiary.

The Argentina Tax Bureau (AFIP) stated that the alleged operations allowed for currency to leave the country and to reduce its tax payments.

“Our main goal is for P&G to return the dollars taken out of the country to the central bank and to pay customs penalties and the income tax that was evaded by manipulating transfer prices,” Ricardo Echegaray, the chief tax collector said in the statement.

Procter & Gamble has been conducting business in Argentina since 1991 and currently manages three manufacturing plants and two distribution centers.

Meanwhile, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has been enhancing efforts to fight against tax evasion and capital flight to boost tax collections.

Last week, Argentina was among 51 countries to sign an agreement to automatically share tax information as part of an OECD and G20 initiative to tackle tax evasion.

Argentina made up the group of 48 nations who pledged to launch their first information exchanges by September 2017, with the three remaining countries on the list expected to follow in 2018.

November 3, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , | Leave a comment